Unofficial news and tips about Google

April 29, 2007

Share Big Files Fast

You'd think that all these communications tools that ask you to move your files online make it easy to move big files too. I've recently had to send an archive that had around 100 MB to a group of people. If I wanted to send the file to a single person, an instant messenger like Google Talk or Yahoo Messenger would've been a good option. I initially thought that BitTorrent is a good idea, but that works well for a big group that connects at the same time (though Pando is a nice client based on BitTorrent).

So file hosting had to work. Unfortunately there are many options and most of them are bad: they require to register, they have traffic limitations or they're slow. Here are some of the best file hosting solutions I've found:

mihd.net - they promise to let you upload files up to 2 GB (they lowered the limit to 200 MB temporarily), the site has a lot of text ads, but the download speed is very good (at least 100 KB/s) and there aren't hourly download limitations. The files are deleted depending on their file size: for 100 MB, they're deleted 45 days after the last download.

DivShare lets you upload files smaller than 200 MB, but they're never deleted. You also get some basic stats and previews for images, MP3s and videos.

MediaFire has a very nice interface and lets you upload files up to 100 MB without any limitation. The download speed is almost as good as for mihd.net and they even scan your files for viruses.

I ended up using mihd, although the other two sites are also very good. If you know something better that doesn't require registration, software and has very few or no limitations, I'm all ears.